On June 29th and 30th, I led my first psychology workshop as a part of Aubrey Marcus’s Fit For Service Mastermind in Tulum, Mexico.

For two days, I gave this workshop 6 times. Below is my best attempt at distilling the essence of what tried to be birthed there.

Title: Making Your Myth

I have found that the single most powerful tool the therapist can give the client is to connect them with that part of themselves we call the soul, or the Daemon, or the voice of god. This workshop is dedicated to this goal.

Part 1: The Two Yous: The Ego and The Daemon

Eye-gazing

To begin the workshop, I had them get into groups of 2 and begin to eye-gaze for 5 minutes. This is a technique I first discovered from this beautiful documentary about artist Marina Abramovic.

Most of us have never, in our entire lives, looked unwaveringly into another person’s eyes for five minutes. The effect it has on us is organically hypnotic (if you are alone and want to follow along, you can enter the same altered state by eye-gazing in the mirror for 5 minutes).

Split-Brain Experiments

I asked the people present whether they focused on one eye over the other, and if they sensed a fundamental difference between the two eyes. I used this as a segue to begin exploring split-brain experiments.

We’ve developed a surgery for people who have grand mal seizures. We’ve found that if we cut to corpus callosum, we can dramatically reduce the intensity of these people’s seizure…but some weird shit happens.

Some patients began reporting eerie behavior. One man would grab a pair of pants with his right hand, and his left hand would smack it away. One extreme case involved a husband shaking his wife violently and the other hand coming to her defense.

These stories culminated in what have been called the ‘split-brain experiments’ that won Roger Sperry the Nobel prize and catapulted the surgeon Michael Gazzaniga to medical fame.

Without getting lost in the weeds, what they discovered is that when we cut the connective tissue between the two hemispheres, the individual begins to act as if there are two independent conscious agents inside them.

The left hemispheres (which governs the right side of the body), is the part of the brain that produces language, and the right hemisphere (which governs the left side of the body), communicates through non-verbal body language.

My hypothesis is that the left brain is the physical home of the Ego, and the right brain is the physical home of the Daemon* (what others call Intuition/etc).

*I want to be clear, this is a gross over-simplification meant to allow you to take action. It is like what a computer desktop is. It is a useful lie that allows you to take pragmatic action (because the icons on your phone are not what the phone is. They are representations that symbolize a combination of 1s and 0s which represent the movement of electricity in the motherboard). The Ego and the Daimon are icons on the desktop of your mind.

I believe the fundamental gift the therapist can give the individual is a connection to their Daemon, and that is what we are going to work towards.

To do so, I am going to share a few stories with you of people who have encountered their Daemon.

Your Daemon will guide you through your Individuation Process

I believe each of us are born with a divine task, and it is to manifest our potential. Different cultures have used different stories to convey this idea, but my favorite version of it came from Carl Jung, and he called it the Individuation Process.

Fundamentally, the Individuation Process is the journey the individual takes into their own psyche.

Inside you, in your unconscious mind, is every monster and every angel you’ve ever read in books or watched on screens. Inside you is a version of you that can save of world, and there is also a version of you in there that could bring the world to ruin.

These forces inside you have been guiding your life. You’ve been unconscious. The beginning of the individuation process is realizing you’ve been asleep.

It is the moment Neo wakes up in the pod, when Simba has realized Scar used him, when Buddha saw the dying man on the side of the road.

Each of us will have a moment where we ‘wake up,’ where we realize the life we have lived up to this moment has been unconscious, conditioned, and asleep.

This moment is the death of our first life, and the beginning of our second life. This second life is the beginning of the individuation process. In order to live a conscious life, you will have to face your unique conditioning, your unique triggers, traumas, and unconsciousness.

It is your connection to your Daemon that will guide you along your journey inward.

This workshop is designed to help you learn how to connect to your Daemon.

These next three stories are examples of people encountering their Daemon, and then I am going to ask you to write yours.

Jung’s Story

Carl Jung, one of the most eminent psychologists produces by the West, thought he was falling into schizophrenia in his early thirties.

He had just published Symbols of Transformation, which was a book that ended his friendship with Sigmund Freud (Jung publicly criticized Freud’s theory of libido and the father of psychoanalysis excommunicated his ‘crowned prince’).

This ‘breakup,’ coupled with the first rumblings of the Great War, are hypothesized by Jung and biographers as to why he began to hear voices and witness hallucinations (some lasting up to 30 minutes), during this 4 year period of his life.

He tried to maintain his daily life with his work and family, continuing to see patients for hours a day, but each night he’d go into his study and do something almost none of us would do.

Instead of finding ways to reduce the intensity of the voices and visions, like seeking some pharmaceutical intervention, he sought to amplify them. He began to paint his visions, and transcribe the conversations he had with the voices.

He diligently did this for years and eventually the voices and visions left him. In their wake, was what is now known as ‘The Red Book.’ Jung wrote in his will that this book was not to be published until 50 years after his death.

This ‘creative illness’ Jung went through was his encounter with his Daemon, and it is from this encounter that Jung worked out most of his ideas that he is famous for today, like: The Shadow, The Anima/Animus, The Self, Synchronicity, and The Individuation Process.

This is what can happen when we answer the call to adventure a meeting with our Daemon invites us to.

Buckminster Fuller’s Story

Buckminster Fuller is one of the greatest inventors in American history. Throughout the course of his life, Fuller would hold 28 patents, author 28 books, and receive 47 honorary degrees.

But in his mid thirties, he tried to kill himself.

Before he went on to change the world, he had put most of his money into starting a business with his father-in-law, and the company had failed. He had lost most of his money and felt like he failed his family.

So he drove to the shore of Lake Michigan, committed to drowning himself.

As he walked to the edge, ready to jump in, he felt what seemed like a voice seize him. It said;

"You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe."

Fuller writes that this moment fundamentally changed the way he saw and lived his life.

You see, it is not the content of the Daemon experience, but the experience itself that transforms people.

My Story

I’m going to ask you to write your own version of your first encounter with your Daemon, and to help you think of your experience, I am going to share my first Daemon story.

When I was 19, I did something stupid to impress a girl.

I drove from my small college campus to The University of Texas’s to eat edibles with her and her friend.

We committed the classic edible mistake; because we didn’t feel the effects of the first one, we ate a second one — then felt the effects of both of them.

As the mistake set in, she clammed up like an oyster and hid under a blanket, completely retreating from the world.

After sitting there for an hour without her communicating, I figured it was time to go.

I went to take her friend home who had supplied the weed for the edibles, and as I got in the car, I slowly felt my anxiety begin to rise. It was dark, this was my first time driving in a city, and I was incredibly high.

As I made my way through the roads of Austin, we turned onto a street where I could see there were a few cop cars in the intersection, and all the traffic was funneled into the far right line.

Sitting in my car, as I creeped towards the police’s lights, my fear got the best of me and I sporadically whipped my car to do a U-turn. As I began making the turn, a car smashed into the left front end of my car.

My left shoulder dislocated.

I was in shock.

I was tremendously high, my friend was high, we both had weed and pipes in our backpacks. The cops were coming.

I was fucked.

Then I realized there was a woman banging on my window. She was enraged. She was screaming “You hit my baby! You hit my baby!

She had the rage of a wounded mother, and it was at that moment that my brain knew, as an absolute fact…I had killed a child.

Words cannot convey the depth of emptiness, the terror, and the utter despair I felt in that moment.

As I sat in my car in the middle of the street, staring at my steering wheel; with a friend on my right side urging me to run, and a furious mother on my left charging me with murder, I had the only true moment of my life where I wanted to kill myself.

I truly believe that if I had had a gun with me, I very well may have ended my life in that moment.

But as I witnessed my future life flash before my eyes, and saw it disintegrated before my impending prison sentence, I felt a voice.

“Take responsibility, one moment at a time.”

The voice felt like a God. It felt like an inner guide. I didn’t know it, but it was my Daemon.

I listened.

I didn’t run.

I slowly pulled my car over to the shoulder of the road. I got out and faced the mother.

The first thing I learned was that her child was fine. She looked to be 4 or 5, she was in the backseat, and she wasn’t even crying.

Okay — huge existential weight lifted off my shoulders, but I would still need to contend with the police.

As they arrived, I was polite, and did my best not to show that I was shaking on the inside, and was so high my eyes looked like they had withstood a sandstorm.

The mother’s anger saved me. While the cops tried to talk to me, she screamed threats. This caused the police to focus on keeping her tamed and kept them from considering I was high or to search my car.

They got their statements, and even called me a tow-truck. I don’t remember how it happened, but somehow the tow truck offered to drop me off at a friends house, and didn’t charge me for the tow.

I was reborn that day.

I truly, in my soul, thought my life was over. I was willing to kill myself, and from that point forward, I had a new sense of gratitude and spirituality. There was something inside me I wanted to get to know better.

All of my work, on some level, has been an attempt to connect to this inner guide, and to help others do the same.

Not one of us are alone.

————————————————————————————————————

For the workshop, I had people partner back with the person they eye-gazed with, and they shared their story with each other.

Once everyone had time to share their story, I invited them back to the group circle and we began with part two.

Your Turn

Set a timer for 13 minutes and write, in as much detail as you can remember, what your first experience with your Daimon was like.

I invite you to find a friend, share this post with them, then share your story. Stories come alive when they are spoken.

This exercise is to help your conscious mind create the first experiential connections between your Ego and your Daemon. It is this connection we are going to work on strengthening in the coming sections.

Part 2: Discovering Prometheus

Now that you have created the conscious link to your Daemon by writing and sharing your first encounter with your Daemon, we are going to use a myth and some science to strengthen this connection.

Before we do this, we need to reframe the ego.

The ego is not something to destroy or condemn.

Nature would not have created something that did not serve a purpose.

The ego is not the enemy, the ego is a wolf.

If you ignore and starve your ego, it will devour your life the moment you slip, but if you become aware of your ego and tame it, it will hunt with you. Your ego has the latent ability to make you a master magician.

This next section explores what happens when you let your Daemon guide your ego — you meet your potential.

What is Your Potential?

Your ego is the force in you that inspires movement. Your daemon is the force in you that inspires direction. Your ego are your legs, your daemon is your compass.

This dance between the ego and the daemon produces the idea of what we tend to call our potential.

Our relationship to our potential is like the connection between the acorn and the oak tree. There is something inside the acorn that knows it is destined to be an oak tree, and it will do everything it can with whatever it has access to, in order to facilitate the transformation from seed to tree.

Our Daemon is a manifestation of this guiding force, and our Ego is a manifestation of our the sheer will to grow and transform.

We are going to use a myth to flesh out this idea of your potential.

The Myth of Prometheus

Once upon a time there were two Titans given the job by Zeus to create the animals of the world. The older Titan was Epimetheus, and his younger brother was Prometheus.

Epimetheus is Greek for afterthought. Prometheus is Greek for forethought.

Being the older brother, Epimetheus got to go first. Using the bag of talents Zeus gave them to distribute amongst the animals, Epimetheus gave them all away, and none were left for humans. He gave birds flight, lions power, snakes venom, cats stealth, etc.

Prometheus was tasked with giving something to man, and since the bag of talents was empty, he decided to steal fire from the Gods for mankind.

Zeus eventually realized how powerful man was becoming and sentenced Prometheus to eternal imprisonment. He chained Prometheus to the side of a mountain where an eagle pecked out his guts everyday.

Since he was a Titan, this did not kill him and he regenerated. The eagle visited Prometheus every day for thousands of years until eventually Hercules came and liberated Prometheus from his bondage.

This is the kind of stuff my parents let me read in 3rd grade.

They had no idea.

Interpreting Prometheus

One of the great gifts Carl Jung gave the zeitgeist was that all myths, on one level, are anthropomorphizations of the human psyche. This means, Prometheus, and the major elements of the myth, are symbols for aspects of the human psyche.

Below is what I believe this myth is anthropomorphizing:

Prometheus = Your Potential

Fire = Sacrifice/Willpower

Zeus = The Critic/Inner Judge

Chains = Self-limiting beliefs

Hercules = The act of liberating our potential from our false beliefs

Prometheus (forethought) represents our god-like power to look into the future. Homo Sapiens appear to be the only animal able to look into the future, and then use the conception of the future to regulate one’s behaviors in the present.

This ability to regulate our behavior in the present because of a potential future state is what the fire represents. The fire is a symbol for sacrifice. Once you are able to envision a potential future state, in order to manifest that future state, you will have to sacrifice certain actions, thoughts, or emotions.

To get the job you may have to sacrifice partying.

To get the relationship you may have to sacrifice protecting your heart.

To get the physical health you want you may have to sacrifice your comfort.

To get the life you want, you will have to sacrifice.

Zeus represents our inner Judge. We each have inside us an inner judge. This judge is trying to protect us from being exiled from the perceived tribe we are trying to fit into, but most of us have a completely overworked and insane inner judge.

His rules, taboos, and convictions are the chains wrapped around Prometheus. The stories we weave about ourselves, that spawn from the protective nature of the Judge, are the chains that keep us small and meek and lost.

Hercules represents the heroic attitude we have to take if we want to do the work of changing the beliefs we’ve learned about ourselves that we know keep us from manifesting our potential.

I believe the hero’s journey represents the stages one must go through to manifest their potential, and I believe seeking to manifest our potential is the proper way to calibrate our Individuation Process.

The Hero’s Journey is the most commonly told story on our planet because it is the structure of the supremely meaningful life; identify the highest aim you seek to pursue, then begin the journey of transforming who you are into that thing you know you could be.

This journey is the Individuation Process.

This journey is represented in the Prometheus Myth.

Envisioning Prometheus

This is a part of the workshop that will evolve dramatically as I learn more profound and impactful ways to connect people to their potential. Currently my domain of understanding centers around journaling and visualization, so that is where we will begin.

I’m going to ask you to journal about your ideal future self, but before I do, I want to let you off the hook.

The future you imagine will not be correct.

It will be the best you can do right now. Your Ego and Daemon are not yet able to fully realize the human you could be. Your Prometheus is wrapped in chains, and that is okay. That means we have work we get to do and that is beautiful.

For the next 13 minutes, in as much detail as you can, journal about your ideal future self. Doing ‘badly’ is better than not doing at all.

Use some of these questions to help guide you:

How am I of service to the world?

What skill do I have mastery in?

Who do I love, and how do I love?

Where do I live, and what is my home like?

How do I dress? How do I walk? How do I speak?

What do I look like?

What do I believe about myself?

How am I experience by others?

What is my legacy?

What are my habits?

What have I sacrificed?

If you want to take this journaling to the next level, create a vision board or draw a picture of this ideal future self.

Part 3: Prometheus’s Fire

There is an archetypical motif across cultures that the true form of God could never be revealed to man because the sheer awe of the experience would cause man to burst into flames.

I believe this is what our potential is like.

The more clearly you see the human you know you could be, the more clearly you begin to know what you need to sacrifice (remember, fire = sacrifice), and this knowing can be incredibly painful.

If I could take liberty and expand on the Prometheus Myth, I would add that the only way to liberate Prometheus would be for Hercules to make an offer to the fire Prometheus gave man that was of equal value to the chain being removed, and as each chain was removed, Hercules would absorb some of the essence of Prometheus.

To remove a chain, a sacrifice needs to be made.

This process would eventually culminate in Hercules tossing his weapon, his golden fleece, and his vanity into Prometheus’s fire. And with each chain removed, more and more of Prometheus would merge with Hercules. Eventually, there would be a single being; half man, half Titan.

This is the kind of being our potential made manifest would be.

This is a metaphor for what happens as we journey through the individuation process. With our potential as the future state we are aiming at, we begin to face challenges - our programming, conditioning, beliefs, and patterns.

Because we know who we want to become, we are able to see what parts of us need to be sacrificed; and this is the gift we get from deeply envisioning our potential.

And there is a beautiful, elegant parallel to Prometheus and his Fire in modern science. It is called Willpower.

Science Calls Prometheus’s Fire ‘Willpower’

Roy Baumeister, one of the most cited psychologists in history, opens his book Willpower, with;

“However you define success, it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven’t learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control…We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare.”

He also found;

"When researchers compared student's grades with nearly three dozen personality traits, self-control turned out to be the only trait that predicted a college student's grade-point average better than chance. Self-control also proved to be a better predictor of college grades than the student's IQ or SAT score."

Jordan Peterson, one of the most influential clinical psychologist living says;

"People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years. We thought it over, and drew a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification."

Given the structure of our society, Willpower has been found to be the most important human trait that we know how to improve. Prometheus is the Titan of our times.

The Marshmallow Experiment

The foundational experiment that the scientific Willpower literature rests on is what has come to be dubbed "The Marshmallow Experiment."

Walter Mischel, a Stanford psychologist, brought children into a room, set a marshmallow in front of them, and told them, "I'm going out of the room for awhile. You can eat the marshmallow after I leave. But if you wait and don't eat it until I get back, I'll give you another marshmallow."

What made the study legendary is that Mischel followed up with these children 40 years after.

What he found was astounding. The children who lasted the full 15 minutes until the 2nd marshmallow, over the next 40 years, went on to:

Score higher on the SAT (average 210 points higher)

Earn higher salaries

Have a lower BMI (Body Mass Index)

Achieve higher long term life success

Achieve higher academic grades

Achieve higher social status

Were jailed less

Abused drugs less

Divorced less

The ability to envision a potential you in the future, and to sacrifice the present to that image is willpower, and those with higher willpower thrive in our culture. Prometheus is the Titan of our times.

Baumeister puts these findings into context;

"These were stunning results, because it's quite rare for anything measured in early childhood to predict anything in adulthood at a statistically significant level."

It is because of the findings from this experiment, along with the discovery that willpower is improvable, that Roy Baumeister wrote the quote that appears at the beginning of this writing.

“We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare.”

Willpower is the scientist's attempt at quantifying Prometheus and his fire. Willpower has been found to be the single most powerful and improvable trait predicting life success. One of the most eminent psychologists alive believes that teaching people how to improve willpower is "psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare."

Meeting Prometheus: How To Improve Willpower

This visualization technique is what I use whenever I am ready to attempt to remove one of the chains around my potential.

I’ll make this a guided meditation at some point, because reading it keeps you from allowing it to inspire a vision, but for now I will describe roughly what I would put in the meditation.

Close your eyes.

Begin to take slow deep breaths.

Feel your jaw unclench.

Feel your shoulders relax.

Feel your breath slowly filling the core of your body.

Allow your mind to slowly begin to image a sacred place.

Maybe it is a temple, a forest, a cave, or ground near a campfire.

This is your sacred location.

Slowly, you see someone walking towards you from the distance.

At first they are just a bright light.

As they get closer, you begin to see the light take shape.

It is you.

It is your potential.

it is the person you know you could become.

They are standing before you, smiling.

Before you is the ultimate gift you can give the world. This is the person you know you could become if burnt off the weak and immature parts of yourself; your vices, your addictions, and your self-limiting stories.

You alone have the ability to bring this being into existence, and you alone have the ability to deny this being existence.

You are this being’s God.

And they ask you; Will you give birth to me?

To do so, you must make a sacrifice.

Ask your potential what guidance they have for you.

What is the next singular habit, vice, or story you must sacrifice to bring a little more of them into the world.

Be silent.

Be still.

Let your potential tell you what the next step is.

And once you hear it, write it down.

Take as much time as you need and write out what your potential is asking you to sacrifice.

————

At this point in the workshop, I had people get back with their eye-gazing partner and had them share what their potential told them to sacrifice. I invited them to become each other’s accountability partner for the next 3 months to check in on their progress towards their sacrifice.

This was the official end of the workshop.

However, now that I have written this all out, I want to add a section that I know will make this all more powerful.

We will use the science of habit change in the next section to help you distill this gift of this vision into a practical plan.

Part 4: Harnessing Hercules

Now that we played in the mythic, let’s make it practical.

Let me be plain; you remove the chains from Prometheus through habit change. You improve willpower by habit change. All integration ends with habit change.

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” -F. M. Alexander

What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say. -Emerson

Your habits, the actions you take daily, the thoughts you think daily, the emotions you feel daily; these make up what you are in the world.

Your task now is to take what your potential gave you, turn it into a single specific habit change plan, and focus on changing this habit for the next 90 days.

Habit change can feel sterile. We tend to think of mundane things like “I want to stop eating candy so I can lose 20 pounds,” or, “I’m going to read every night instead of watch TV to go to bed earlier.”

These are fine, but, frankly, they feel void. They feel like the kind of thoughts a disconnected modern person shrugs into existence.

The way I view habit change is little older, and a little more archaic.

I see them as self-created initiation rituals.

Tulum’s Temazcal

For thousands of years, cultures across the world have used initiation rituals as symbolic representations of transformations.

I do not find it merely chance that the day after the workshops in Tulum, the Aubrey Marcus team participated in a modern version of an old initiation ritual; a temazcal.

This is an old mesoamerican sweat-lodge ceremony that takes place in what looks like a cement igloo. Participants are instructed to crawl through the opening, and pack into a circle along the wall, facing the middle.

In the middle is a circular pit where furnace-heated stones are placed that begin to heat up the room. Once enough rocks have been placed in the center, the shamans will enter, drop a cloth over the opening, and submerge the room in complete darkness.

They will begin to sing songs and tell tales while rhythmically splashing water on the stones. The mist produced becomes so thick that you feel invited to give into claustrophobe.

There are 4 ‘sessions,’ where at the end of each (lasting between 15-20 minutes), they will open the door, and give everyone a few minutes to cool off.

By the end of the 3rd round, I was at my limit. I felt I may pass out. I felt fear and anxiety and worry try to claim my brain, and this is the point of initiation rituals; to force you to a point that your current story about who you are and what you are capable breaks.

What initiation rituals show you is that you are more capable than your fear and anxiety will have you believe.

Intuition rituals break Prometheus’s chains.

I made it through the final session and slowly stumbled towards the ocean, steam rising off my body, ready to fall into the water.

When my brain slowly came back online, I reflected on the power of initiation rituals, and how void our current culture is of them.

An earnestly performed initiation ritual will change the story you tell yourself about who you are.

This workshop is dedicated to this goal, and you have the ability to voluntarily submit yourself to initiation rituals.

Below is how you can do that.

How to Change a Habit

I could make an entire course on how to change your habits (and I will one day), but for now, I will just give you the best approach I know of to date.

We are going to do 4 things:

Distill your journal entry into a single habit change

Create an Implementation Intention for this habit

Track our progress

Review and iterate every night via journal or meditation

A Single Habit

The single most common mistake I see people make when it comes to trying to change a behavior is they try to do too much, too quickly, and burn out in a few days.

If this is a habit that your ideal future self would have, there is no rush. If you get this right over the 90 days, it will fundamentally change the course of your life.

Look at what you wrote, and distill it into a single habit change.

For example:

I know I need to sacrifice my story that my body is not strong, so for the next 90 days, I will do something everyday that is focused around moving my body.

Implementation Intention

An implementation intention is a scientifically researched way of articulating a habit change goal that increases the likelihood of changing a habit by up to 300%.

The structure of an implementation intention is:

I will perform Behavior A, in context B, to achieve goal C.

Example:

I will move my body for at least 30 minutes, whenever I walk in the gym, in order to change my story that my body is weak.

Track

Keep it simple.

Get a whiteboard, put it next to the door of your room, and mark a huge X on everyday you do your habit.

The Xs will begin to pile up and momentum will be on your side. ‘Don’t break the chain’ is the motto here.

Review

Every night, either via journal, or through imagination while you lay in bed to sleep, review your habit. Did you do it today? How do you feel? If you didn’t do it, why? What can you do tomorrow to help you do it?

You can always tap back into the meditation we did and call your potential to come to you and give you advice.

This is a constant dance. You will stumble, and you will grow. Please leave comments and questions you have so I can improve this and make it more effective for people that come after you.

Epilogue

One of my favorite quotes of all time is:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town.

I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself,

and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself,

I could have made an impact on my family.

My family and I could have made an impact on our town.

Their impact could have changed the nation and

I could indeed have changed the world.

This is the guiding ethos of my work. I believe if we seek to change ourselves, to move from who we are to who we could be, we begin to change the world.

My favorite story that encapsulates this Tao is Jung’s story of ‘The Rain Man.’

Jung’s Rain Man

This is a story from The nature Writings of C. G. Jung (2002)

There was a great drought where the missionary Richard Wilhelm lived in China. There had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said: We will fetch the rain maker. And from another province, a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day clouds gathered and there was a great snowstorm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rain maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it.

In true European fashion he said: "They call you the rain maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?" And the little Chinaman said: "I did not make the snow, I am not responsible." "But what have you done these three days?" "Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordnance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and then naturally the rain came."

Life is symphony. Tune yourself and you help others tune themselves.

I find that my favorite metaphor for being is that of a symphony. This world is a grand song being played by 8 billion instruments. The song is out of tune, naturally, but there are pockets within the symphony that are in alignment. The most impactful act we can offer the collective is to bring ourself into order, and as we do this, we give the instruments around us a stable base to tune to.

This is our task; to hear our true song, to tune our instrument to it’s melody, and to allow our sound to help others tune.

Get still and find your song.

Then dance.

If You Enjoyed This

The goal is to grow the website and podcast to a point that I can pay my bills and eventually raise a family on it. We’re in the pupil stage of this thang, and there are a few things you can do to help this manifest.